Israeli Press
Elazar Stern joins Eisenkot as Winter's new party splits Netanyahu's right
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Image credit: Gadi Eisenkot — Wikimedia Commons / Spokesperson unit, President of Israel · License
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Two moves in the Israeli campaign reached the Hebrew press on Monday morning, and read together they explain why the arithmetic of the 27 October election keeps turning on the Palestinian vote.
The first is a defection. Elazar Stern, a former minister and reserve major general, announced he is joining Yashar, the party of the former chief of staff Gadi Eisenkot, ten days after leaving Yair Lapid's Yesh Atid. Maariv and Ynet both carried the announcement. "Israel needs credible, statesmanlike and experienced leadership," Stern said. Eisenkot said Stern represents a religious Zionism of the state that believes in service and responsibility.
The second is a fracture on the other side. Ofer Winter, the reserve brigadier general who commanded the Givati brigade during the 2014 assault on Gaza, is building a right-wing party, and the Israeli right's own commentators now describe it as a threat to the governing bloc rather than an addition to it.
The threshold trap#
On Maariv's political programme, the analysts Aviv Bushinsky and Avi Mimran walked through what Winter does to Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition. Bushinsky called the new party a serious pain for the prime minister, and the reason is not vote-splitting in the ordinary sense: Winter draws from the same religious-nationalist pool as Bezalel Smotrich's Religious Zionism, and may pull it under the electoral threshold entirely.
A Channel 12 poll published on 17 August put the effect in numbers. In the scenario that includes Winter's list, the list itself takes 2.5 per cent — under the 3.25 per cent threshold, so it wins nothing — while Religious Zionism falls to 2.7 per cent and is also wiped out.
Netanyahu's camp drops from 50 seats to 47 in that scenario, and the parties ranged against him rise to 73.
Mimran said Netanyahu's real task is therefore to press Itamar Ben Gvir into accepting a merger with Smotrich, and that Winter complicates even that, because a merged far-right list gives right-wing voters who dislike the arrangement somewhere else to go.
Why Netanyahu wants a high Arab turnout#
The part of the analysis that matters most to readers here is the part Israeli commentators state without embarrassment. Bushinsky said that in this respect Netanyahu's interest is to go and tell the Arabs to run to the polls.
The mechanism is the surplus-vote rule. When a party fails to clear the threshold, its votes are discarded and the seat share is recalculated among those that cleared it, which in practice hands seats to the largest blocs. Bushinsky put the Arab parties' at-risk vote at some 140,000 — votes that vanish if a list falls short, to the benefit of the right.
That is the kingmaker paradox this paper has reported since the campaign opened. The Arab lists hold seats both blocs need, and neither bloc will seat them.
Balad's return to a joint run strengthens the Arab bloc's chances of clearing the threshold, and Bushinsky's reading is that this complicates opposition coalition-building rather than easing it — because a larger Arab bloc that no Zionist party will sit with does not become a government, it becomes a larger group of excluded members.
The Palestinian stakes in this arithmetic are concrete. The bloc that forms the next government will decide whether the annexation legislation now before the Knesset advances, how the West Bank is policed while settlers blockade villages, and what happens to the Gaza framework. Neither of the two leading parties, Yashar or Likud, has offered the two million Palestinian citizens of Israel a place in it.
